Hinduism's most famous scripture is a conversation in a chariot before battle
The Bhagavad Gita opens with a warrior prince who cannot bring himself to fight. His charioteer, the god Krishna, spends 700 verses persuading him that doing his duty without claiming the action as his own is the path to freedom. Nobody knows exactly when it was written, and scholars doubt one person wrote it.
The Gita forms chapters 23 to 40 of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the epic often called the world's longest poem, though it is usually read alone with its chapters renumbered 1 to 18. Its title means God's song or the Divine Song, and the word Gita is feminine because the text was traditionally classed as an Upanishad; every chapter closes with a phrase naming it so. Remarkably, while the rest of the epic survives in wildly varying manuscripts, copies of the Gita differ only slightly.
Dating it is hard. Most estimates put it in the second or first century BCE, with proposals ranging from 400 to 500 BCE to the first century CE. Arthur Basham argued it fits an age after Buddhism, Jainism and the reign of Ashoka, when the ethics of war were being questioned and monastic renunciation was fashionable. Its Sanskrit sits between Vedic and classical forms. Tradition credits the sage Vyasa, with the god Ganesha writing it down using a broken tusk, but scholars treat Vyasa as symbolic, and Basham detected three or more hands.
The core problem is Arjuna's. Facing kinsmen across the field at Kurukshetra, he hesitates to do his duty as a warrior. Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, answers that one should act according to dharma while attributing every action to God rather than oneself. The text fuses several strands of Indian thought: Vedic duty, yoga and knowledge rooted in Sankhya philosophy, and loving devotion, or bhakti. Unlike the ascetic path of escaping karma by withdrawing from action, it argues for engaged, selfless work.
Some old sources mention 745 verses, but the eighth-century commentator Adi Shankara fixed the count at 700, probably to block further insertions, and that became the standard. Most verses use a metre of four eight-syllable quarters, switching to longer Vedic lines at dramatic moments. Many readers take the battlefield as an allegory for the struggles of any human life.
Source: Bhagavad Gita
